UGBA 10 Lecture Notes - Lecture 23: Throat Culture, Norm (Social)
23 May 2018
School
Course
Professor
Developing Organizational Culture April 1
I. The power of culture
• Power of culture: system of shared values and norms that is i the air; affects how you
anticipate things in the future (ie: dress, pregnant woman).
o Values: principle, standard of quality considered desirable
o Norms: unwritten rules and expectations of conduct which prescribes a type of
behavior
o Culture shapes employee behavior- build appropriate behavior by establishing
expectations and how you communicate/demonstrate behavior to people
▪ Rewards and reinforces appropriate behavior (ie: wearing Cal gear on the
Berkeley campus)
▪ Punishes and isolates violators of the culture- penalty for not reading the
situation closely (ie: wearing the wrong dress to a frat party, wearing a
Stanford shirt on a Berkeley campus)
o Culture is a form of informal (social) control, not formal (written) control; it is a
set of expectations and social conventions communicated between people
o Strong norms increase clarity about priorities and expectations- what is right
behavior and what will happen if you do the right (or wrong) thing
• Examples:
o Google: strog ulture ad alue do’t e eil; they ath people so that
their eployees do’t iolate the opay’s alue eause they have access to
confidential information about users. Google uses culture to promote self-
restraint
o Amazon: has 18 rules for employee behavior; cut throat culture
o Goldman Sachs: highly professional business with very strict rules (access to
confidential information)
o Professor Banks offered free muffins/money: she rewarded students that went
after the free money and changed the social norm that it is inappropriate to go
after free stuff. This shows that you can shape employee behavior in
organizations by selectively rewarding and punishing behaviors to signal what is
socially acceptable. The intent was to violate as many norms as possible
II. What makes strong culture
• Intensity
o Fundamental belief or just a job
o Examples: Teach for America, Jack in the Box, the military
• Degree of agreement: stronger agreement = stronger culture
o Unity of arrig fratios: high leels of itesity ut lo leels of agreeet
o Examples: US Armed Forces (high central agreement towards a goal) and UC
Berkeley students (everyone can hold their own opinion)
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
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